We’ve talked endlessly about how the Dallas Mavericks have surprised the NBA. The expectation was the Mavericks would struggle throughout the season and finish outside of the playoff race. Dirk Nowitzki would suffer the fate of many other Hall of Famers and go out not on top, but on a club fighting to stay relevant.
We’ve showcased the surprising play of both Nowitzki and Zaza Pachulia. We’ve talked about how Deron Williams has been the steady hand at the point Dallas needs.
But as we reach the midway point of the season, we need to give credit where credit is due and recognize the real force behind the Mavericks’ success this season: Rick Carlisle. His creative plays and lineups have taken a team full of question marks to fifth in the West and a 21-15 record.
In his eight seasons as Mavericks head coach, Carlisle has never had a losing record. In fact, in his 14-year coaching career, he’s had only one sub-.500 season, and that was 2006-07 with Indiana. Over the course of his coaching tenure, he’s collected 640 wins, an average of 47.6 wins per season as of the end of the 2014-15 season. With 15 more wins, he’ll pass the recently departed Flip Saunders for 20th place on the all-time coaching ranks. Earlier this season he moved past Don Nelson and became the winningest coach in Mavericks’ history with 359 wins and counting.
As the head coach for Detroit, Indiana and Dallas, Carlisle has had his share of great coaching performances. In particular, his 2001-02 season with Detroit was a thing of beauty. In his inaugural coaching season, he led an overpaid, under-talented Pistons team, with Ben Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse, to 50 wins and the second seed in the East. For all his hard work, Carlisle was rewarded with Coach of the Year honors that season.
Stephen Lew/Icon Sportswire
This season, however, Carlisle has perhaps put forward his finest work. Over half the roster is new, seven players returned from last year, and only three of them (Nowitzki, Chandler Parsons, Devin Harris) were solidly in the rotation playing more than 20 minutes per game. He lost his leading scorer, Monta Ellis, his best rebounder, Tyson Chandler, and valuable rotation players Richard Jefferson and Al-Farouq Aminu.
Throughout all the change, Dallas’ offense hasn’t regressed much after subtracting Ellis’s 18.9 points per game. Scoring over 105 points per game last season, the Mavericks are managing to drop nearly 102 points per game in 2015-16. With the top two players in Defensive Rating gone in Aminu and Chandler, the Mavericks’ defense has surprisingly jumped up from 20th to 15th this season.
Even more remarkable, Carlisle has taken a squad that ranked 23rd in defensive rebounds last year all the way to fifth in the Association. Their defensive rebound percentage last season was an abysmal 72.2 percent, ranking 29th. This season? They’ve climbed to 77.6 percent, good for sixth.
Carlisle has had to find a way to integrate three new starters in Williams, Wesley Matthews and Pachulia into his system. On top of that, the coach has needed to manage the minutes of two players coming off serious offseason surgeries in Matthews and Parsons. Also, with the Mavericks owning the second-oldest roster in the league, limiting the older players on the team became vital. Specifically the 37-year-old Nowitzki, so the club isn’t burnt out with dead legs by season’s end.
Desperate times call for creative measures. Parsons’s knee injury has taken longer than many have expected to recover from, forcing Carlisle’s hand as the Mavericks have no natural reserve small forward on the roster. With Parsons on the bench, Carlisle inserted Felton into the starting lineup to play alongside fellow point guard Deron Williams, pushing Matthews to the 3.
The trio plus Nowitzki and Pachulia have played over 200 minutes together and have been wildly efficient, scoring 1.176 points per possession (equivalent to a 117.6 Offensive Rating), per nbawowy.com. That five-man unit has played solid D as well, as they hold a plus/minus of 67 points this season.
Injuries to Williams have forced Carlisle to decide who to start at the point in his stead. A safe assumption would’ve been to think Felton would get the nod, or even Harris, to get the start over life-long backup Barea. Looking like another one of Carlisle’s surprisingly successful tricky maneuvers, Barea came out to lead the club in points his first two starts. He’s averaged 16.6 points, 5.4 assists and 3.0 three-pointers in his seven starts, and more importantly, Dallas went 5-2.
For all the challenges this year, Dallas has only lost three games in a row once this season, and two of those defeats were at the hands of two of the NBA’s elite teams, the Spurs and Thunder, and by only a total of eight points. They’re one of nine teams with a winning road record.
Throughout this season, Carlisle has taken an undermanned, outgunned Mavericks squad to a level no one thought was possible. They’ve persevered through adversity and have put themselves in a position to make the playoffs once again, proving that Carlisle deserves high consideration for 2015-16 NBA Coach of the Year.
The post Rick Carlisle Deserves Early Consideration for Coach of the Year appeared first on Today's FastBreak.